Our nation's press: rolled again

At the risk of being repetetive, when will the major news outlets get wise to this?

Republicans close to the White House said that although President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were genuinely angered by the Newsweek article, West Wing officials were also exploiting it in an effort to put a check on the press.

"There's no expectation that they're going to bring down Newsweek, but there is a feeling that there is no check on what you guys do," said one outside Bush adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified as talking about possible motives of the White House.

"In the course of any administration," he continued, "you have three or four opportunities, at most, with a high-profile press mistake. And if you're going to make a point - and no White House is ever going to love the way it's covered - you have to highlight those places where there is a screw-up."

Some news media commentators said that the White House was blaming the press for problems of its own making.

"This is hardly the first time that the administration has sought to portray the American media as inadequately patriotic," said Marvin Kalb, a senior fellow at the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University. "They are addressing the mistake, and not the essence of the story. The essence of the story is that the United States has been rather indelicate, to put it mildly, in the way that they have treated prisoners of war."

But damn, they're good. Listening to sports talk radio yesterday afternoon (I was stuck on the Whitestone Bridge, on my way to "Asian Night" at Shea Stadium), one of the bloviators interrupted his list of what's wrong with the Yankees, to screech that "No patriotic American should ever buy Newsweek again!" Must have said it eight times in ten minutes. The kool-aid on this one has been particularly powerful out there on the airwaves.

Newsweek's editor's rolled onto their backs and exposed their bellies to little Scottie McClellan's vague menacing. They have only themselves to blame for this (although Spikey's role in all of this has sure been underexposed...via Atrios). And another channel for Americans to get real news of what our gov'mint is doing is now closed off, at least for the time being.